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The
Eye of Faith
Ron
Rhodes
 t was
a Wednesday afternoon. Shrouded in a dense fog, a large steamer
edged slowly forward off the coast of Newfoundland, its foghorn
crying out somber notes of warning. The captain, nearing exhaustion
from lack of sleep, was startled by a gentle tap on his shoulder.
He fumed and found himself face to face with an old man in
his late seventies.
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The old man said,
“Captain, I have come to tell you that I must be in Quebec
on Saturday afternoon.”
The captain pondered for a moment,
and then snorted, “Impossible!”
“Very well,” the old
man responded, “if your ship can’t take me, God will
find some other means to take me. I have never broken an engagement
in 57 years.”
Lifting his weary hands in a gesture
of despair, the captain replied, “I would help if I could—but
I am helpless.”
Undaunted, the old man suggested,
“Let’s go down to the chart room and pray.” The
captain raised his eyebrows in utter disbelief, looking at the
old man as if he had just escaped from a lunatic asylum.
“Do you know how dense the
fog is?” the captain demanded.
The old man responded, “No.
My eye is not on the thickness of the fog but on the living
God who controls every circumstance of my life.”
Against his better judgment, the
captain accompanied the old man to the chart room and knelt
with him in prayer. With simple words a child might use, the
old man prayed, “O Lord, if it is consistent with Thy will,
please remove this fog in five minutes. Thou knowest the engagement
Thou didst make for me in Quebec on Saturday. I believe it is
Thy will.”
The captain, a nominal Christian
at best, thought it wise to humor the old man and recite a short
prayer. But before he was able to utter a single word, he felt
a tap on his shoulder. The old man requested, “Don’t
pray, because you do not believe. And as I believe God has already
answered, there is no need for you to pray.” The captain’s
mouth dropped open.
Then the old man explained, “Captain,
I have known the Lord for 57 years and there has never been
a single day that I have failed to gain an audience with the
King. Get up, captain, and open the door, and you will find
the fog is gone.”
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George
Mueller (1805-1895)
One
of the early members of the Brethren, he founded five
orphans’ homes in Bristol, England, with shelter
for 2,000 children. During his lifetime he cared for
almost 10,000 orphans and received $1.5 million [multi-millions
of today’s dollars] by faith alone. Before his
death he estimated he had received 50,000 specific
answers to prayer.
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The captain did
as he was requested, and was astonished to find that the fog
had indeed disappeared.
The captain later testified that
this encounter with the aged George Mueller
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completely revolutionized his Christian life.
He had seen with his own eyes that Mueller’s God was the
true and living God of the Bible. He had seen incredible power
flow from a frail old man—a power rooted in simple childlike
faith in God.
The late Pastor Ray Stedman once
delivered a sermon in which he said, “Faith has an apparent
ridiculousness about it. You are not acting by faith if you
are doing what everyone around you is doing. Faith always appears
to defy the circumstances. It constitutes a risk and a venture.”
That is the kind of faith George
Mueller demonstrated decade after decade in his long and fruitful
life. During the final year of his earthly sojourn, he wrote
that his faith had been increasing over the years little by
little, but he emphatically insisted that there was nothing
unique about him or his faith. He believed that a life of trust
was open to virtually all of God’s children if only they
would endure when trials came, instead of giving up.
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